Absent from the guide, of course, is Netflix. The subscription service is not yet available in Australia, but many Australians use the service anyway by circumventing its geo-blocking using a VPN.

Netflix is the second most popular paid-content media company in Australia, representing 27 per cent of the subscription rental media service market in Australia, according to the August 2014 issue of Choice Magazine.

Cranswick said that the popularity of Netflix in Australia shows that “people do want to pay for content when the price is right and done the right way.".

“The Australian distributors, Foxtel/Telstra, Seven, Nine and Ten are using typical rent seeking strategies to control content within a market,” he said.

“There has been some speculation that there will be a huge shake out – even a bloodbath – when Netflix officially comes to Australia, but based on the current reach it has in Australia, it would be hard to make a business case to go with that route.”

“Every time a movie or a TV show is accessed in breach of copyright, all of those people who contributed to making that work lose out,” Turnbull wrote.

“Nobody would justify going into a supermarket and stealing their weekly grocery order, or stealing a car. Not many people would think it was okay to rip off the latest album, make your own CDs and sell them on the streets or Sydney, or knock off a designer label for that matter, or pass off a cheap white spirit as ‘Bacardi’ when it isn’t.”

“But many of us seem to think that on the Internet the usual rules don't apply and stuff you would normally pay for in the analogue world, you can swipe for nothing online without feeling bad about it.”

While rights holders and copyright organisations supported the paper’s proposals, ISPs and consumer advocates raised red flags because it explicitly seeks to undo the victory of iiNet in a case brought against the ISP by movie studios.

Copyright 2016 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.